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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

As we’ve reported previously, nurses are as fond of mobile technology as doctors, with large numbers bringing their own devices in for day-to-day communication at work. Maybe that’s why a new app — dubbed “Yammer for hospital staffers” by GigaOm — is getting so much money and attention.

The app, PatientTouch for the iPod Touch, has already been rolled out to 65 hospitals across the country, GigaOm reports. And today, maker PatientSafe announced that it had received $20M in funding for Merck. That brings its total amount raised to an eye-popping $50 million. That’s gotta be some kind of record for health apps, even in the red-hot clinical communication app space.

As GigaOm describes it, PatientTouch’s core functions allow nurses to collect basic It’s also offering souped-up communications. Not only does it offer Yammer-like person to person chat, that chat also can be integrated directly into EMRs. (The story doesn’t say exactly how this wonderfulness happens, or whether, say, it works with a leader like Epic or Cerner or Meditech.)

But that’s not all. PatientTouch also comes with a “jacket” for the Touch which protects it from unsanitary conditions and fluids, preserves battery life, and more intriguingly, includes a bar-code scanner.

The understandably proud CEO of PatientSafety, Joe Condurso, told GigaOm that on any given day, 7,000 PatientSafe-equipped Touches are in use.

I can see why the VCs and Merck are so excited by PatientTouch. It’s based on a very cheap yet powerful platform, offers (what I’ll assume is) secure communication between providers without the BYOD mess and integrates with EMRs, yet. What’s not to like?

All that being said, I can’t see a solution like this one as more than a bridge. Sure, it’s great that it’s helping nurses communicate via a better channel than random BYOD-driven text and e-mail until EMR makers create their own mobile front ends. But personally, I hope the need for a transitional solution like this doesn’t last long. It’s long overdue for the big EMR vendors to create robust mobile front ends of their own that integrate directly into their platform. Enough foot dragging, already!

One response to "iOS App For Hospitals Snares $20M In VC Funding"

It’s not foot-dragging, it’s a huge philosophical and technical hurdle. You can’t re-write 40 years of mumps in a day, and a large company can’t instantly re-envision how to interact with complex health data on a mobile device. I would look instead for MU stage 2 to finally set the groundwork for a swing back to best-of-breed, and then the pace of mobile adoption will pick up the pace.